Note: The Guardian accidentally edited this column such that the last paragraph contained an untrue statement. I have emailed the readers editor for a correction.

Ben Goldacre
The Guardian,
Saturday May 10 2008

So basically I sit here with a big bag of standard tools from the world of evidence, and wait for stories to come along which allow me to deliver a 600 word lecture on them. Sit tight, this one’s slightly complicated. In America last week the papers went crazy: artificial blood products cause a 30% increase in deaths, and a 2.7-fold increase in heart attacks, according to a new meta-analysis in the Journal of the American Medical Association. There is, incidentally, a trial of these products still ongoing in the UK.

Read the rest of this entry »

Like most people I generally can’t be bothered to protest or write huffy letters to my MP about things like embryonic stem cell science and animal-human hybrid embryo research, because I have a vague notion that nobody will listen to the religious fruitcakes anyway and it will all take care of itself.

In the case of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill I’m no longer convinced that sense will prevail, so I’m happy to spread the word about this protest next Monday outside parliament. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Goldacre
The Guardian,
Saturday May 3 2008

Traditionally on May Day the fool plays at pratfalls and buffoonery around local morris dancers, brandishing his fool’s bauble, an inflated pig’s bladder on a stick, with which he bewitches and controls the crowds. To the uninitiated it looks like chaos, but for his own safety the fool must know the dances as well as anyone, so that his weaving tomfoolery meshes perfectly with the intricate pattern of kicks, handkerchief waving, and stickbashing.

In the newspapers on May Day, meanwhile, journalists were earnestly reporting the news that pig’s bladder extract had been used by scientists in a major breakthrough allowing one man to magically regrow a finger. “‘Pixie dust’ helps man grow new finger,” squealed the Telegraph’s headline. “‘Pixie dust’ makes man’s severed finger regrow,” said the Times. “Made from dried pig’s bladder,” they explained, this magic powder “kick-starts the body’s healing process”. Read the rest of this entry »

Very briefly - because this kind of thing irritates me so much that I can’t be bothered to devote a great deal of time to it - in almost every single newspaper and media outlet today you will read about the Pixie Dust which helped a man’s finger grow back: “The man who grew a finger” [BBC], “‘Pixie dust’ helps man grow new finger” [Telegraph], “Man’s finger ‘regrown using pig extract’” [ITN], “Sliced finger grows back” [The Sun], etc.

Allow me to explain why I have good grounds to believe that this is nonsense, and that the journalists concerned have failed in the most basic regard.

[NB I gave this story some chat on the Today programme at 7:43am May 2, listen again here]

Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Goldacre
The Guardian,
Saturday April 26 2008

And so our ongoing project to learn about evidence through nonsense enters its sixth improbable year. This week, the assembled celebrity community and vitamin pill industry will walk us through the pitfalls of reading through a systematic review and meta-analysis from the Cochrane Collaboration, an international not for profit organisation set up 15 years ago to create transparent, systematic, unbiased reviews of the medical literature on everything from drugs, through surgery, to community interventions. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Goldacre
The Guardian,
Saturday April 19 2008

Paranormal phenomena are on the rise this spring, as any viewer of Street Psychic, Most Haunted Live, The Psychic Detective, Psychic Investigators, Mystic Challenge, and Psychic School would know. In Durham, Easington district council has paid for psychic Suzanne Hadwin to exorcise a poltergeist from the home of one of its tenants, who complained of objects moving, doors slamming, and a dressing gown floating down the stairs.

The family report that the spirit has now gone, and the house has a “lovely atmosphere”: an excellent psychic service at a competitive price (only £60).

But there is a darker side. In February a psychic was called to investigate a reported zombie in underground tunnels at an Eastbourne sewage plant. “It’s not funny going to work and worrying that a zombie might be around the corner,” said one plant worker. It’s even less funny for a consumer to be cynically exploited by a psychic, because everybody knows that although psychics have their merits, they are entirely useless in this situation: to kill a zombie, you must destroy its brain. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Goldacre
The Guardian
Saturday 12th April, 2008

If you put aside the fact that most of the people who campaign against food additives should be taken out and shot for crimes against the enlightenment, even a stopped clock shows the right time twice a day, and the evidence overall genuinely shows that some food additives probably aren’t too Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Goldacre
The Guardian,
Saturday April 5 2008

There’s this vague idea - which has been going around for the past few centuries - that statistics is quite difficult. But in reality the maths is often the least of your problems: the tricky bit comes way before the number crunching, when you are deciding what to measure, how to measure it, and what those measurements mean.
Read the rest of this entry »

Newsnight do Brain Gym, and Paxman interviews the man who invented it.

Read the rest of this entry »

Busy bee today, sorry for the late link, the second part of the BBC Radio 4 two-part series “The Rise of the Lifestyle Nutritionists” is going out at 8pm this evening, presented by yours truly (part one here) and produced by the excellently sharp Rami Tzabar from the BBC Radio Science Unit. I think it’s rather good, and makes a single clear point: lifestyle is important, and we all want to improve our health, but the evidence on diet and health is not sufficient to justify the very specific and confident advice which we crave, and which some will sell to Read the rest of this entry »